Donald Trump stood alone on a long level in the white and gold ballroom of Mar-a-Lago, his hands clutched on either side of the desk, his head tilted to one side. An attendant had hit the newly banged blue signal in the cockpit in a while before taking the level: TRUMP. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!2024.
“It’s a sublime night, a sublime place,” Trump mused, his face pursed in a gesture of disapproval. Too sublime, he hinted, for the vulgar things he would have liked to say, the things he thought. to use the word fake news,” he said. We will keep it very sublime. “
Say what you need about Donald Trump, the guy is not a coward, almost anyone could want it. His advisers had begged him not to give the speech, not while his party was still healing the wounds of the last disappointing election, nor either. while the Republican Party was still looking to win a final round in the Georgia Senate. Trump was so eager to run again that he nearly withdrew the cause before last Tuesday’s midterms. He undulates invisibly in the damp outdoor darkness of the Rococo Florida auditorium, to make his disappointing announcement: that he would run for president for a third time.
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He did it with an almost resigned and joyless air, with his jaw clenched, hunting the teleprompters as if they had done him unforgivable damage. Just two years after leaving the White House, the country, he said, in a sorry state. “Under our leadership, we were a wonderful, excellent country, something you haven’t heard in a long time,” he said. when he claimed that as president he had spent “decades” without being involved in any war (Trump was president for 4 years and failed to end the war in Afghanistan).
He did so almost isolated: Though the ballroom is filled with the same collection of Trump supporters and sycophants, from the “Front Row Joes” camped out at his rallies to former top White House officials, the only sitting member of Congress. to watch was Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina. who lost his number one and left the Capitol months ago. Even Trump’s superfan, Matt Gaetz, the scum-stirring Florida congressman, made the decision at the last minute not to show up, and he didn’t mention obvious weather situations to anyone else. Melania Trump went out with her husband, seeking elegance in a polka dot blouse, but she stayed backstage as he spoke. After Trump finished his speech, his daughter Ivanka issued a statement saying she would not be part of the new campaign.
He did so a week after an election that had challenged his position as god-emperor of the Republican Party like never before. The long-awaited red wave did not materialize. Democrats retained the Senate and nearly retained the House, and Republicans blamed Trump, whose hand-picked eccentrics had been rejected differently by voters hungry for change. Conservative media in the House and Senate, even Republicans who were once sympathetic, covered up to call him a loser and brazenly solicited new leaders.
Trump, as he has, resisted, a guy who opposes the global. The status quo may desire so much that it sought to make it disappear, but it would never consent. The Republican Party, Twitter and cryptocurrencies imploded at the same time, a cosmic reorganization seemed to be underway. These are the moments Trump has seized: the moments of each for himself, the moments of maximum chaos and disorder, the moments when other practical people run for cover, the moments when a leader is needed.
He came here to offer the same thing he has: defiance, hostility, omnidirectional oppositionism. It used to be shocking and new, something no one had noticed before. America used to be so desperate for anything else that even fools seemed worthy of a chance. In retrospect, it was an innocent, boring, and indulgent time. Now we’re in another mood: “People are tired of hating each other, fighting nonstop,” a former senior Republican official told me, sounding either disappointed and hopeful.
But Trump is that there are enough other people who still crave his crazy call. “I didn’t want that,” he reflected. I had a very pleasant and simple life. It’s everything I didn’t want. Neither did many of you!But, he says, we love our country.
Trump has his own explanation of what happened midterm: Things didn’t happen badly enough. Biden’s tenure is a mess, but a slow one that has yet to fully manifest itself in the consciousness of many.
“There are a lot of complaints about the fact that the Republican Party deserves to have done better and, frankly, a lot of that blame is right,” Trump said. “But the citizens of our country have not yet learned the full extent and severity of the pain our country is going through. The full effect of suffering is only beginning to be felt. They still don’t feel it. You will feel it very soon. I have no doubt that until 2024 it will unfortunately be much worse, and you will see much more evident what has happened and what is happening to our country, and the vote will be very different.
However, Americans who voted a week ago seemed to have no illusions about how things would go. A large majority told pollsters they had an idea the country was on the right track. They don’t like the current president, they distrust his control of the economy. and public safety, they worry about the future. They simply did not see the cheerful group of lunatics resistant to Trump’s reality as an appropriate alternative.
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Many Republicans, tolerant in a different way with Trump, can’t stand losing and are willing to move on. “He handpicked a number of applicants who turned out not to be competitive, and Republicans lost a number of races that had it not been for him. If we hadn’t gotten involved, we probably would have won,” said former Rep. Tom Davis, pointing to Pennsylvania, Arizona and New Zealand. Hampshire as examples. ” He tries to make a party in his image, but politics is about coalitions. It doesn’t play well in the sandbox.
In the hours leading up to Trump’s speech, his party collapsed on Capitol Hill. A week after Election Day, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy nonetheless saw the majority inside his master and was named chairman through his caucus on Tuesday. late. But he received only 188 votes out of the 218 he will want in January, in the face of a bubbling conservative insurgency that isn’t sure he knows how to tame. Meanwhile, in the Senate, Republican leader Mitch McConnell, condemned to remain in the minority, faces a challenge from Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who seems unlikely to succeed but will further divide the sometimes coherent ranks of the party.
Trump also faces new challenges. The call on everyone’s lips is Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor whose landslide 20-point victory last week was a rare moment for the embattled Republican Party. The New York Post called it “DeFuture. ” Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming called him “the existing leader of the Republican Party. “After the election, Trump issued a heartbreaking DeSantis, which he calls “DeSanctimonious” as “average. “And then, he introduced an unprovoked racist crusade against Virginia. Governor Glenn Youngkin for smart measure. In Tuesday’s speech, Trump did not mention any of his potential rivals.
Trump has a clear merit on his warring parties for the inauguration: his military, the stalwart base that will stick to him to the ends of the earth, which he would even look at the government if he told them to do it for him. But even that might not last: Several new ballots put DeSantis among the number one Republican electorate. In one, a national poll of the number one Republican electorate conducted after Election Day through the nonpartisan communications company Seven Letter Insight, DeSantis was the most sensible pick. 34%, ahead of Trump’s 26%, that same ballot found that 67% of the entire electorate, numbering 40% of Republicans, think Trump deserves not to run in 2024. Too late.
Trump has something else that his competence does not have: his sheer recklessness, his willingness to do or say anything, to destroy anything or in his way to get what he wants. Now he runs again, and to enter the arena, they have to start with him. It is, once again, the axis around which everything revolves.
Trump advisers tell reporters this crusade will be “lightened,” a lighter, back-to-basics enterprise, more akin to the 2016 wing-and-prayer effort than the long presidential paintings of 2020. As in 2016, Trump would not have to be the nominee. of maximum electorate to win the nomination of the party. A fractured box can barely split the vote and allow it to win with majorities.
His rivals face a conundrum: if they retaliate against him, they threaten to lower themselves to his level; If they take the highway, they threaten to leave her unharmed. His 2016 competition made any of those mistakes, suggesting Republicans have no right or way to beat Trump; There is no way. His former vice president, Mike Pence, who was harassed by a fatal mob cheering through Trump on Jan. 6, released a memoir Tuesday lamenting Trump’s “reckless” behavior, adding to the pile that also includes multiple civilians and robber investigations. “I’m a victim,” Trump paused to practice at one point, but controlled himself so as not to let go of one of his long conspiratorial tirades.
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Will this really be the end for Trump, after all that many other people thought they deserved to have been but weren’t?”Don’t stay doing this over and over again,” said David Kochel, a veteran of several national and national Republican campaigns based in Iowa. “But anything about Trump simply understands how to get other people back online. That’s his superpower, I guess.
In his lengthy announcement speech, which all cable networks had disrupted long before game time, Trump addressed many of the topics of his rallies, but remained more focused than on politics. He did not mention the stolen election, those of January 6. The “deselected” committee, or the annulment of Roe v. Wade through the Supreme Court that falsified: the other big thing that thwarted the red wave that n’t. It focused on trade, China, nuclear weapons and surveillance. “The bloodied streets of our former big cities are cesspools of violent crime,” he said, calling for the swift execution of drug traffickers. Trump watched sullenly the entire time. He switched confusingly between the purported golden age of his presidency, the depressing times before (Obama), the mythical Before Time when America was great, and the depressing state of affairs, which he called “the pause,” the depressing interregnum that would send the American electorate rushing into his arms.
“From now until election day in 2024, which will be very temporary. Look how time flies!” said Trump, “I will fight like no one has before, and we will defeat the radical left-wing Democrats who are going to destroy our country from within. “
It is a wounded animal, the maximum danger. But for now, he has the land to himself. If you need to compete the most, you will have to enter your arena.